Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  In this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator.

  —Texas Declaration of Secession

  The U.S. Census was critical to American politics in the mid-nineteenth century. The accounting of the country’s population determined a state’s political representation in Congress, and therefore the electoral college vote for president. The Constitution spelled out that slaves counted as three-fifths of a white man when apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. For that reason, a planter who might hide his slaves when the taxman came by made certain they were counted when the census taker visited.

  In Falls County, an assistant marshal took the census by going from home to home, tallying the number of dwellings, the number of families, and the names of all the family members. The marshal recorded each person’s age and gender, his or her occupation if the individual was an adult, and where the person was born. They also recorded the family’s estate and whether anyone was disabled.

  Assistant Marshal J. C. Billingsley visited the west bank of the Brazos on July 23 and 24, 1860.1 In cursive handwriting, he recorded the Tomlinsons as the forty-seventh family he had visited in that precinct. Jim Tomlinson was then forty-six years old and his wife, Sarah, forty-two. He counted James Eldridge, seventeen, and William, fifteen, as farm laborers. The rest of the children were Amanda, thirteen; Augustus, twelve; John, ten; Eldridge, five; Sarah, one.

  Mary Travis lived with the Tomlinsons. Her children included Mary, who was eighteen; Caroline, sixteen; John, fourteen; Nicholas, twelve. Of the fourteen whites on the plantation, Jim was the only adult male.

  Jim listed real estate assets of $25,000 and personal property worth $27,585. This made him one of the wealthiest planters in Falls County, where the average white family might have a few thousand dollars. Mary Travis was more representative, with no real estate and just $2,800 in assets. On the other end of the spectrum, Churchill was the richest man in the county, listing $200,000 in real estate holdings and personal assets of $153,150.

  To count blacks, the census included “Schedule 2,—Slave Inhabitants.” In Texas, the names of the slaves were not recorded. The census taker put the name of the slaveholder on the first line, and then each slave was listed according to gender, age, and “Color.” Blacks were given the letter B. People of mixed race were assigned the letter M, for mulatto.

  Jim Tomlinson listed twenty-eight men and twenty women as his property, their ages ranging from one year old to seventy-five. Five had a white father and were listed as mulattoes. Mary Travis held four men and three women, according to the census. With fifty-five slaves, Tomlinson Hill was one of the largest slave plantations in Falls County, and this placed Jim in the top 2 percent of slaveholders in Texas.2

  Roughly ten families lived in western Falls County at the time.3 The Tomlinson house was about a mile sorth of Frank Stallworth’s farm, where he held twenty-four slaves. The Jones compound was two miles to the south. Ben Shields was their neighbor to the west, about a mile away. Another friend of the Tomlinsons and Stallworths who lived north of Tomlinson Hill was Samuel Landrum, a friend who had arrived a year earlier from Alabama.4

  Another resident of western Falls County was William G. Etheridge, who had moved to Texas from Arkansas, where he had supervised the construction of a railroad. He lived near Shields’s house on Deer Creek, northwest of Tomlinson Hill. These families would come to depend on one another and become intertwined as war loomed and financial ruin came to Falls County.5

  SLAVEHOLDERS OPPOSE SECESSION

  The large planters in Texas wielded economic and social influence beyond their numbers, while the average farmer did not own slaves and survived on subsistence farming. These poor farmers aspired to the wealth and leisure that the planters enjoyed, but they resented how the planters relied on slaves. With blacks making up 47 percent of the population in Falls County, the poor Texan’s greatest fear was a slave insurrection.6

  Poor whites also worried about what could happen if blacks gained equal rights, including the right to vote. White political leaders played on fears of black equality and black retribution to win support for secession. The tactics worked well with the uneducated masses, but it did not hold water with many of the large slaveholders. The wealthiest planters were for the most part members of the Whig party and believed that constitutional arguments were the best way to fight northern abolitionists. Like anyone with a lot to lose, they favored law and order over radical solutions like secession. The more educated planters felt they were protected by the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared no person of African ancestry could hold U.S. citizenship, and therefore could not vote. The Supreme Court also consistently upheld personal property rights. To many wealthy planters, secession was an illogical rush into an abyss.7

  Abraham Lincoln’s presidential candidacy also stoked southerners’ fears. His “A House Divided” speech in 1858 made it clear that he felt the disagreement over slavery had to be resolved by abolition. The speech’s title comes from Matthew 12:25, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

  Ironically, Texas revolutionary hero Senator Sam Houston had used the same quote eight years earlier during his speech to Congress supporting the Compromise of 1850, which allowed for the expansion of slavery into the Southwest. Houston was famous for leading the Texas rebel army during the Anglo insurrection against Mexico in 1836. He also served as the first and third president of the Republic of Texas. He had been one of the main architects of Texas’s becoming part of the Union and became one of the first two senators from Texas in 1846. Houston left the Senate in 1859 to run for governor as a Unionist. He won by leveraging his connections with powerful plantation owners.8

  Once in the governor’s mansion in Austin, Houston campaigned to maintain the Union, rejecting the premise that an independent South could form alliances with European powers. He knew that Britain, which had passed the Slave Trade Act of 1802, was not going to help the South as long as it allowed slavery. But for all of Houston’s reasoning, the average southerner became convinced that John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was just the beginning of a northern movement to encourage a slave rebellion and the massacre of pro-slavers. Soon a paranoia swept across Texas and doomed Houston’s campaign to keep the Lone Star State in the Union.9

  SUSPICIOUS FIRES

  On July 7, 1860, the Marshall Texas Republican newspaper reported that Independence Day celebrations were unusually quiet because of a drought and heat wave.10 When a fire started at Wallace Peak’s drugstore in Dallas on July 8 and ended up destroying most of the business district, the 678 Anglo residents were unnerved. Initially, they suspected the fire was caused by prairie matches, a new kind of phosphorous match that could spontaneously combust in hot weather. But fears of arson appeared confirmed when similar fires erupted the same day in Denton’s town square and in Pilot Point. Suspicion turned into conspiracy theory when three more fires broke out in towns across north Texas, including Ladonia, Honey Grove, and Milford, within a week.11

  One farmer, who’d watched his barn burn before the Dallas fire, interrogated his slaves. He eventually forced one to confess to setting the fire. Other slaveholders followed suit, and more slaves confessed to increasingly outlandish plots. Charles R. Pryor, the editor of the burned-out Dallas Herald, spread the panic by writing to other newspaper editors about a statewide plot by abolitionist preachers to foment a slave insurrection. “I write in haste, we sleep upon our arms and the country is most deeply agitated.” The Austin, Bonham, and Houston newspapers published the dispatch and subsequent letters describing a plot led by two Methodist abo
litionists who allegedly planned to install black men in power so they could exact revenge. Arson was only the beginning, Pryor wrote. “Poisoning was to be added, and the old females to be slaughtered along with the men, and the young and handsome women to be parceled out amongst these infamous scoundrels.”12

  Communities across Texas formed vigilance committees: secret groups formed to bypass normal law enforcement and courts. For the most part, theses groups acted unchecked.13 A Dallas vigilance committee executed three slaves on July 24 for the fires there. Committees in six more counties executed an unknown number of blacks for their part in what nationally became known as the “Texas Troubles.” Though the troubles never reached Marlin and Tomlinson Hill, Falls County residents formed vigilance committees and armed patrols.14

  Not everyone bought into the conspiracy theories, nor did everyone believe the slaves’ confessions. Sam Houston and A. B. Norton, editor of Austin’s Southern Intelligencer, accused Pryor and his allies of fabricating the plot to win votes for pro-slavery presidential candidate John C. Breckinridge in the August 6, 1860, election. Breckinridge went on to win in Texas.15

  Historians today agree with the cooler heads in 1860. Prairie matches combusting inside hot and dry wooden buildings during a heat wave almost certainly started the fires.16 The panic and the lynchings accomplished nothing in terms of justice, but they did prepare Texans for secession.

  On September 22, 1860, Sam Houston gave one of the most important and eloquent speeches of his life at a Unionist rally in Austin. He was sixty-seven years old and ill, and he knew most Texans would condemn him, but he spoke as long as he could.

  The Union is worth more than Mr. Lincoln, and if the battle is to be fought for the Constitution, let us fight it in the Union and for the sake of the Union.…

  Who are the men … taking the lead in throwing the country into confusion? Are they the strong slaveholders of the country? No; examine the matter and it will be found that by far the large majority of them never owned a negro, and will never own one. I know some of them who are making the most fuss, who would not make good negroes if they were blacked. And these are the men who are carrying on practical abolitionism, by taking up the planters’ negroes and hanging them.… Texas cannot afford to be ruined by such men.17

  On November 8, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the electoral college in a four-way race and became the president. He lost the popular vote by almost one million ballots and received fewer than 100,000 votes outside the states he did win. Not a single vote was recorded for him in Texas. Despite Lincoln’s pledge not to outlaw slavery, and his party’s failure to win control of either the Senate or the House, his election was the last straw for those who supported slavery. South Carolina moved first, placing a secession bill on the legislature’s agenda less than week after Lincoln’s victory. That state was the first to secede on December 20, 1860.

  Houston stalled as long as he could. Initially, he refused to call a state convention to debate secession. Under enormous pressure, though, he called the legislature into special session and it authorized an election to select delegates to a state convention. Convention delegates voted for secession 166–8. Unionists had only one chance at overturning the decision, and that was a public referendum. Houston and other Unionists traveled the state, trying to win enough votes to stop secession before the law took effect on March 2, the anniversary of Texas’s independence from Mexico.18

  Churchill was one of the planters convinced that “he was better protected in his slave property than he could possibly be under any new form of government, as the sentiment of the civilized world was emphatically opposed to this peculiar institution.”19 Shields spoke up at a secession meeting near Tomlinson Hill, where “people were wild with excitement.” “Many now living can recall his fervid reasoning and impassioned appeals to friends and neighbors, that they should stick to the grand old Union of Washington and Jackson. The effect of his effort was to partially break up and cut short the meeting.”20

  When Houston came to town, he led a Unionist rally at the courthouse. Shields, Churchill, Jim Tomlinson, and William Etheridge attended. When Houston stepped from the stagecoach, he was clearly in pain and angry. A crowd in Waco had thrown stones when he spoke, and he had blood on his clothing.21

  Houston’s campaign, though, did little good. The adult white men of Falls County voted 215 in favor of secession, with 82 against.22 The opposition to secession in Falls County was higher than average, surely influenced by the most prominent planters in the county. But an overwhelming number of Texas voters chose secession.

  As a child growing up in Texas, I was taught that secession was not about slavery, but about states’ rights. Like many of the Civil War fairy tales told to children in the South, that simply isn’t true. White Texans were deeply racist and devout believers in white supremacy. They had heard all of the arguments against enslaving other human beings and rejected them. There is perhaps no clearer statement of their beliefs than the declaration of Texas secession. Texans argued they had joined the Union only sixteen years earlier while “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits”:

  We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

  That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.23

  Texas became independent for the second time on March 2, and the state convention immediately sent a delegation to apply for membership in the Confederacy. They need not have bothered. The Confederacy had admitted Texas before the state applied. Texas became part of the Confederate States of America on March 5, 1861.

  All state elected officials in Texas were required to take an oath to the Confederacy. Houston refused, saying it would violate his oath to the United States. The legislature declared the governor’s office vacant. Lincoln sent word through a military officer that he would send Union troops to keep Houston in office. But Houston rejected the offer. He didn’t want to spark the Civil War.24

  Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee was commanding the Second Cavalry in San Antonio when Texas seceded, and he pondered his own future. Many of the federal troops in Texas were southerners, and most were heading home while Unionists boarded ships for northern ports. Despite listening to an impassioned plea from Unionist judge Edmund J. Davis in the Menger Hotel, Lee decided that his loyalty belonged with Virginia.

  Many Texans felt their obligation was to follow their state, even if they opposed secession. William Etheridge was an exception. He was close to Shields, Jim, and Churchill, but he was a strong supporter of the Republican party, and the pro-slavery residents of Falls County knew he opposed them. The twenty-six-year-old was not about to compromise.25 Etheridge and his wife, Ellen, rode north, where they remained until the war was over.

  Once Texas had seceded, passions grew stronger. Zenas Bartlett may have been born and bred a Yankee, but he had married into the slaveholding Jones family. On March 18, 1861, he wrote his uncle Joe to express his fear and anger:

  I hope the consciences of you people will now be at ease as the sin of slavery is removed. I have no doubt you wonder much at the course the South has taken, but had you li
ved here as long as I have, you would have been one of the strongest for Secession. How can you forget that your leading men have repeatedly said that this country must either be all slave or all free—that John Brown and confederates invaded our soil with quantities of pikes and arms made in New England to distribute to negroes to murder white men, women and children—that you sympathized deeply that he failed and suffered the just penalty of his crime—that Massachusetts even made a Governor who said [Brown] was right and sympathized so deeply for him that he put on mourning at his death.

  Can we forget that here in Texas the past summer we had to watch over our houses and stores nights for many weeks to prevent the Hellish abolitionists from burning us out, and that some four or five of our most flourishing villages in this region were destroyed. Now is it strange that when we succeeded in catching any of them we should hang them to the first tree we come to? Is it unreasonable that we claim the right to take our property unto territory acquired by our blood and money as much as yours? Is it strange that we quit the Union when you pass laws imprisoning the owner who is in pursuit of his fugitive slave when the Constitution expressly says he shall be given up?26

  The first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. Once the fighting began, the question of secession was moot. Everyone knew they had to choose a side. Etheridge chose to leave Texas. But the Tomlinsons, Joneses, and Stallworths stayed with their state and prepared for war.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  The dream of a short and active campaign under which I enlisted has vanished.

  —James Jones

  The shots at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, started a war, but in Falls County they had little impact on the Tomlinsons’ immediate needs. Clearing the scrub forest that covered the Brazos river bottom and planting a crop before the spring rains ended required everyone to work long hours. While Jim still had an interest in his Alabama plantation, his older brother was running that one. The immediate need, war or no war, was to get a crop in the ground. All of Jim’s money was tied up either in slaves or in the new plantation, and he needed to ensure income for the family at harvest time.